If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows!
Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama’s lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.
There were no toys under the bed – that wasn’t why he liked it. Why he liked it was that there wasn’t anything under the bed – no chickens, no Joey, no Eloise, no sheep, no “no”s. He could lie under the bed and not be told anything at all.
She didn’t relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages are discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortbread emerging from the oven, and her grandchildren laughing in the next room had indeed made her life a golden age.
Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after day.
He’d said, “Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.
Joy had never before been to a university party where there were no drinks, and her immediate reaction was that she just couldn’t find it, that there was a bar somewhere in the house where a nice young man in a white jacket was pouring out Bloody Marys, but that no one would tell her where it was.
So it was with Vigdis’ neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.
She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed.
She had felt a surge of fear so strong.
Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.
He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark.
However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
She always said, ‘When I’m home, I’ve got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.’ And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.
Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The.
The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.
Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there.
She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.
We drove in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus loves me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known.
If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.